Fads come and go, certainly, but you can’t always tell the difference in the moment between a fad and a trend  –  because refusing to adapt to the trends can be limiting . . . if not disastrous.  Let me share a couple of examples where failing to see where things were headed didn’t turn out well.   An engineer presented the idea of a “filmless camera” to the executives at Kodak back in 1975, but they laughed him to scorn.     In 2012, Kodak was forced to file for bankruptcy because they failed to adapt to the digital world.     We all know Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, but how many of us recognize the name of Ron Wayne (and, no, that’s not Batman’s brother)?     Ronny was the third founding member of Apple, and he sold his 10% stake in the company in 1976 for $1500.     His shares would now be worth over $50 billion.     WAY BACK in 2000, Reed Hastings approached Blockbuster and offered to sell ...

Here in the lovely state of Arizona where we live six months of the year seven inches from the surface of the sun, we usually have what we like to call a “dry heat”  –  not unlike an oven, if you will. However, for about six blessed weeks in the middle of all this wonderful heat, we have Monsoon Season where it rains like it’s trying to catch up with Seattle’s annual precipitation totals, and our streets turn into rivers and our parks into lakes.  You can read all about it in the brochures they give out at the airport.   After one of our most recent monsoon storms, I was driving along one of the higher-elevation streets that didn’t become a river, and I noticed that on one side of the road in front of a rather fancy housing development was a row of rather mature Palo Verde trees  –  and every single one of them had been toppled over by the wind with their entire root systems exposed for all to see. (I’m sure arborists were blush...

Years ago when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created, we had some wacko thought that part of the job of the folks filling its ranks would be to . . . protect the consumer.  In some people’s view, this would mean that builders of new homes would no longer be able to dangle the carrot of “free” incentives if the buyer would finance the purchase through the builder’s in-house or preferred lender.  To those same people, it just made sense that the CFPB was created to even the playing field and make it so that the consumer got the very best deal available.  Well, we were wrong. Builders ARE allowed to offer incentives for using their in-house and preferred lenders despite the fact that sort of goes against the idea that the consumer is getting the very best deal available. And for most consumers, all they see is the incentive, and this computes to less money coming out of their pocket at closing  –  and they’re right (sor...

“We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.” There are multiple jokes out there with that as the punch line, but we won’t go down that path today  –  it could lead to some pretty dark and/or inappropriate places, and this is a family show.  I’m not down on the government, and that’s not the point of this week’s newsletter, but this is a cautionary note to all of you out in real estate land about a government program here in Arizona called Pathway to Purchase  –  I’m sure each state has a similar catchy-named program. For those who qualify for P2P (we even have a cool acronym, right?), they can get up to 10% of the purchase price or $20,000 (whichever is less) FREE to be applied to the down payment and closing costs. Bring it on!  The qualifying individual(s) can have an income up to $92,984 (I’m sure that oddly specific number comes from some pointy-headed individual deep in the bowels of our state’s bureaucracy), and t...